Who Killed Johnny Bernard?

LARRY FESSENDEN (2016 2016 Podcast, 24 minutes)

LARRY FESSENDEN, JAMES LE GROS, NOAH LE GROS

After a devastating accident, a man struggles to alter the fate of his son.

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Tales From Beyond The Pale, the epic ten-year radio drama from Glass Eye Pix,
is sharing the love by gifting listeners with two amazing new episodes.

Morbidly Beautiful

Listener Beware: Two New Episodes of
‘TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE’
Coming Soon!

PopHorror

Two new “Tales From Beyond The Pale”
debuting from Glass Eye Pix, including
one for Valentine’s Day.

Rue-Morgue

Morbidly Beautiful

TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE, THE EPIC TEN-YEAR RADIO DRAMA FROM GLASS EYE PIX, IS SHARING THE LOVE BY GIFTING LISTENERS WITH TWO AMAZING NEW EPISODES.

TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE, THE PODCAST, which has been presenting new and archived content every week since October 10, 2019, is pleased to offer two brand new episodes starting with a particularly ghoulish Valentine’s Day offering, Die Sleeping My Sweet by Glenn McQuaid, dropping Thursday February 13th. The following week, TALES celebrates its 20th episode with Fessenden’s Who Killed Johnny Bernard?, a powerful portrait of a life lived and lost, based on Fessenden’s late childhood friend.

The brain-child of Glenn McQuaid (I Sell The Dead, V/H/S) and Larry Fessenden (Depraved, Habit, “Until Dawn”), TALES has received rave reviews and five-star ratings across the board on platforms from iTunes to Spotify, startling listeners with its remarkable variety of stories, its caliber of talent, and immersive production value.

NOW, JUST IN TIME FOR YOUR VALENTINE’S DAY WEEKEND, TALES PRESENTS A TWISTED LOVE STORY WITH GLENN MCQUAID’S DIE SLEEPING MY SWEET.

McQuaid describes the show as, “bringing together my love of soap opera melodrama, bear porn, and medical thrillers.”

The piece is the third in a loose trilogy within Tales that includes The Crush (Episode #3) and The Ripple at Cedar Lake (Episode #7), and continues McQuaid’s exploration of bold queer characters caught up in peculiar situations. He further explains:

“The format of the audio drama has allowed me to explore characters, stories, and tone in a way that I wouldn’t have otherwise. The further I delve beyond the Pale, the more confident I am in leaning into the exploration and experimentation of auditory possibilities.”

**AND BE SURE TO TUNE IN NEXT WEEK FOR WHO KILLED JOHNNY BERNARD? (DROPPING FEBRUARY 20TH).**

Fessenden says this about the very personal episode:

“It speaks to the broad opportunity offered by the TALES platform that I was able to process my grief at the loss of a friend by delving into a sweeping Tale that brought together so many of my themes of fate and belief and sudden violence and love, all in an ambitiously structured nifty half hour entertainment. We are so grateful to have an audience for our stories.”

Both Die Sleeping my Sweet and Who Killed Johnny Bernard? were performed at New York City’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in front of a live audience. The stunning posters were created by comic book illustrator and tattoo artist Brian Level.

**FOLLOWING THESE TWO WORLD PREMIERES, TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE, THE PODCAST WILL CONTINUE TO OFFER UP A DIFFERENT TALE EACH WEEK.**

Coming up are TALES by Clay McLeod Chapman, Sarah Langan, Joe Maggio, Kim Newman, JT Petty, Simon Barrett, and a host of others, featuring the voice talents of Vincent D’Onofrio, Ron Perlman, Doug Jones, Amy Seimitz, Tony Todd, Kate Flannery, Leon Vitale, Lance Reddick, A.J. Bowen, Pat Healey, Joshua Leonard, Martin Starr, Ana Asensio, Cooper Roth, Samuel Zimmerman, Jeremy Gardner, Roxanne Benjamin, Larry Fessenden, and many, many others.

Produced by Fessenden’s maverick production shingle Glass Eye Pix (Depraved, The Ranger, Most Beautiful Island, The House of the Devil, Stake Land, I Sell The Dead) and originally released in lavish box sets illustrated by genre talent from Gary Pullin to Graham Humphries and Brian Level, Tales From Beyond The Pale will be celebrating its Ten-Year Anniversary in Fall, 2020.

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PopHorror

Listener Beware: Two New Episodes of ‘TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE’ Coming Soon!

TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE, THE PODCAST has been killing it with new and archived content since October and they’re stopping anytime soon! They will be offering two brand new episodes starting with a particularly ghoulish Valentine’s Day offering, Die Sleeping My Sweet by Glenn McQuaid, dropping Thursday, February 13th. The following week, they will celebrate their 20th episode with Fessenden’s Who Killed Johnny Bernard? An epic portrait of a life lived and lost based on Fessenden’s late childhood friend. Both of these sound freaking awesome and I can’t wait to check them out. Learn more about them down below!

Press Release for Tales From Beyond The Pale, The Podcast

The brain-child of Glenn McQuaid (I Sell The Dead, V/H/S) and Larry Fessenden (Depraved, Habit, “Until Dawn”), TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE, THE PODCAST, has received rave reviews and five-star ratings across the board on platforms from iTunes to Spotify, startling listeners with its remarkable variety of stories, its caliber of talent, and immersive production value.

Just in time for your Valentine’s Day weekend, TALES presents a twisted love story with Glenn McQuaid’s Die Sleeping My Sweet, which he describes as, “bringing together my love of soap opera melodrama, bear porn, and medical thrillers.” The piece is the third in a loose trilogy within Tales that includes The Crush (Episode #3) and The Ripple at Cedar Lake (Episode #7) and continues McQuaid’s exploration of bold queer characters caught up in peculiar situations. Continues McQuaid, “The format of the audio drama has allowed me to explore characters, stories, and tone in a way that I wouldn’t have otherwise. The further I delve beyond the Pale, the more confident I am in leaning into the exploration and experimentation of auditory possibilities.”

Of Who Killed Johnny Bernard? (dropping February 20th) Fessenden says, “It speaks to the broad opportunity offered by the TALES platform that I was able to process my grief at the loss of a friend by delving into a sweeping Tale that brought together so many of my themes of fate and belief and sudden violence and love, all in an ambitiously structured nifty half-hour entertainment. We are so grateful to have an audience for our stories.”

Following these two world premieres, TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE, THE PODCAST will continue to offer up a different Tale each week, mixing premieres and new content with stories plucked from archives comprised of 40+ half-hour recordings from a diverse swath of genre writers. Already presented on the podcast and available for your enjoyment are works from directors such as Graham Reznick (Dead Wax, I Can See You, Until Dawn), Stuart Gordon (Re-Anaimtor, From Beyond), Eric Red (The Hitcher, 100 Feet) , Paul Solet (Grace, Bullet Head), Jeff Buhler (Pet Sematary, Jacob’s Ladder), Ashley Thorpe (The Hairy Hands, Borley Rectory), April Snellings (“Ghoulish: The Art of Gary Pullin”), and of course, Fessenden and McQuaid.

Coming up are TALES by Clay McLeod Chapman, Sarah Langan, Joe Maggio, Kim Newman, JT Petty, Simon Barrett, and a host of others, featuring the voice talents of Vincent D’Onofrio, Ron Perlman, Doug Jones, Amy Seimitz, Tony Todd, Kate Flannery, Leon Vitale, Lance Reddick, A.J. Bowen, Pat Healey, Joshua Leonard, Martin Starr, Ana Asensio, Cooper Roth, Samuel Zimmerman, Jeremy Gardner, Roxanne Benjamin, Larry Fessenden, and many, many others.

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Rue-Morgue

TWO NEW “TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE” DEBUTING FROM GLASS EYE PIX, INCLUDING ONE FOR VALENTINE’S DAY!

As part of their acclaimed, long-running series of horrific audio dramas, Glass Eye Pix’s Larry Fessenden and Glenn McQuaid have a brand new pair of TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE premiering on their podcast in the next couple of weeks. Jump past the jump for the info and posters.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, McQuaid’s twisted love story DIE SLEEPING MY SWEET will drop tomorrow, February 13 (these episodes will be accessible via the TALES website or any podcast network). In this episode, “A comatose patient desperately tries to communicate with the outside world, if only to implicate the woman that put him there,” and the cast includes Fessenden regular John Speredakos, Caprice Benedetti, Juan Carlos Hernandez, Teresa Kelsey and Matthew Stephens Huffman. This TALE, McQuaid says, “brings together my love of soap opera melodrama, bear porn and medical thrillers. The format of the audio drama has allowed me to explore characters, stories and tone in a way that I wouldn’t have otherwise. The further I delve beyond the Pale, the more confident I am in leaning into the exploration and experimentation of auditory possibilities.”

On February 20, Fessenden’s own WHO KILLED JOHNNY BERNARD? hits the web; in this one, “After a devastating accident, a man struggles to alter the fate of his son.” James Le Gros and his son Noah (both seen recently in Fessenden’s DEPRAVED) star, along with Lauren Ashley Carter (DARLING), Speredakos and Huffman. “It speaks to the broad opportunity offered by the TALES platform,” Fessenden says, “that I was able to process my grief at the loss of a friend by delving into a sweeping Tale that brought together so many of my themes of fate and belief and sudden violence and love, all in an ambitiously structured, nifty half-hour entertainment. We are so grateful to have an audience for our stories.”

Both episodes were performed at New York City’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in front of a live audience. The posters were created by comic book illustrator and tattoo artist Brian Level. More TALES will be presented on the podcast this year (which marks the series’ 10th anniversary), including episodes written by Clay McLeod Chapman, Sarah Langan, Joe Maggio, Kim Newman, JT Petty, Simon Barrett and many others, featuring the voice talents of Vincent D’Onofrio, Ron Perlman, Doug Jones, Amy Seimitz, Tony Todd, Kate Flannery, Leon Vitale, Lance Reddick, A.J. Bowen, Pat Healy, Joshua Leonard, Martin Starr, Ana Asensio, Cooper Roth, Samuel Zimmerman, Jeremy Gardner, Roxanne Benjamin, Fessenden and more.

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The Pale Men on “Who Killed Johnny Bernard?”

Pale Men Glenn McQuaid and Larry Fessenden chat about Fessenden’s audio drama Who Killed Johnny Bernard? Now available at TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE The Podcast. Sketches by Brian Level.

GLENN McQUAID: WKJB is a very personal piece for you, how was the experience of putting your grief into this story?

LARRY FESSENDEN: The script came to me very organically. I had been to my friend’s funeral and many stories were told and so the set pieces wrote themselves: The accident, the sailing ship, swimming with a whale shark, working in a bank. Of course I added the bargain with the demon, because that’s what we do in story-telling, we envelope the truth in a cloak of the imagined to quench our thirst for meaning in a random world.

I liked the idea of writing a literary piece, with plenty of voice over. Sometimes with our Tales we dive into the drama through dialogue and sound effects and let the audience figure out where they are, but here I wanted to celebrate the written word with a prose style and that approach worked for this piece.

Another structural device I employed was to repeat the same dialogue twice, providing a jump-scare with the accident the first time, and then the second time, a deepening of the emotion and sense of dread as you start to recognize the dialogue and this time you know what’s coming. I like to think of it as a demonstration of Hitchcock’s famous description of shock vs. suspense: if there’s a bomb under the table and it goes off, that creates shock. If you know it’s under there, but the characters don’t, that creates suspense. This is maybe a slight variation, where you feel sad because you know the fun they are having is going to end horribly.

Anyway, these are all things we can do in our radio plays: experiment with ideas in writing and structure and point of view and see what we can get away with in this format. As for dealing with grief, I cried many times writing the piece. At least the process was cathartic for me, I can’t judge its effect on the listener.

GM: Who Killed Johnny Bernard uses quite a few different locations and drifts between several time-lines, how did you find producing and directing such an ambitious live event?

LF: Glenn, you and I worked very hard to have the transitions make sense. Ambiences and sound effects are even more crucial in a piece like this because they are actually establishing cut points and dissolves between time and locations as if it were a film. It was quite ambitious to pull it off. It is after shows like this that we always say, why not run the same tale for a week so we can actually do it right. Alas, we have never allowed ourselves that opportunity. I don’t mind the punk aesthetic but it takes its toll.

GM: As somber as the piece gets, I had a lot of fun working on it with everybody, there was a fun, family oriented vibe about the production that echoed some of the lighter moments of the story. Was that intentional?

LF: The story deals with the relationship between father and son and it was quite magical to have my pal James Le Gros and his son Noah on stage and then myself and my own son playing music for the piece. Glass Eye Pix projects always aspire to family and camaraderie not because we’re a bunch of saps, but because that is the best way I know to ward off the darkness all around. This radio play is about the horror, but it is also a celebration of a life well lived and the other intangible things we must defend, even as our ideals unravel in the public sphere.

GM: It’s alway a pleasure to work with James LeGros and he is terrific here, was he on your mind while writing?

LF: James is family, I always know he will serve the material well. I liked the idea of pairing him with his own son for this so it might have been on my mind.

GM: Matthew Stephen Huffman, one of the nicest guys I know, is absolutely terrifying here, what have we done to poor Matt?

LF: Matt is a treasure we’ve been mining since the first season of Tales. He has a great voice and the perfect attitude for the Tales ensemble. I think life has pulled him away from acting regularly but it is nice to know we can drag him back to the mic now and again and get these delicious performances.

GM: Music is a big passion of both of ours, how cool was it to have your son, Jack Fessenden jam along side you and James LeGros’ son, Noah?

LF: That was fun, all part of putting something real and unexpected on stage. We’re the producers: If we want to end the play with a little sax solo, that’s just what we’ll do!

In conclusion I want to post this photo of me and the real Johnny (last name not Bernard), showing the sorts of things we got up to. At my insistence we would perform scenes from “Cabaret” for friends and family, with him playing Liza Minelli and me as Joel Grey. John was game for anything. We were doing drag acts in the 70s before it was cool.

Larry Fessenden (Narrator) – He is the director of the art-horror films NO TELLING, HABIT, WENDIGO, THE LAST WINTER and BENEATH. He is a producer on dozens of projects in and out of the horror genre including STAKE LAND, THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, I SELL THE DEAD, THE COMEDY, and WENDY AND LUCY as well as the audio series TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE, created with the mad Irishman Glenn McQuaid. Fessenden has operated Glass Eye Pix since 1985 with the mission of supporting individual voices in the arts.

James Le Gros (John Bernard) – Minnesota born James has been featured in multiple Glass Eye projects including BITTER FEAST and THE LAST WINTER. Otherwise he can be seen in POINT BREAK, ENEMY OF THE STATE, and the television series JUSTIFIED and the mini-series MILDRED PLACE.

Noah Le Gros (Johnny Bernard) – Noah Le Gros is an actor, known for A Score to Settle (2019), Depraved (2019) and The Get Down (2016).